Review: Pantech Renue for AT&T

The Renue has a simple music playback app. It can play music that's been sideloaded to a microSD card, as well as music purchased through AT&T's horrendous Music Store. The music player lets users sort by song, artist, album, and genre, and, surprisingly, includes a 6-band user-adjustable equalizer. Music playback through my favorite earbuds was surprisingly robust. There's also a little widget that pops up on the home screens when you have music playing so you can control the player when doing other things.

So why do I dislike the AT&T Music Shop? Because it's all based on AT&T's browser-run content store. Navigating the content store is a nightmare and a half. Everything requires page refreshes, and purchasing tracks takes at least five steps, which is three too many. Throw in uncompetitive pricing ($1.99 - $2.99 per track, REALLY???), and you have a worthless piece of software.

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Video

Pretty much the same thing goes for the on-board video player app. It's as basic as they get, and is really only good at playing back video content captured on the device itself. It only saw about half the video content I sideloaded onto a microSD card (i.e. anything with DRM attached won't work).

The Renue doesn't have a video store on board, not from AT&T, not from Pantech.